Thursday, May 08, 2008

You've heard me talk about how the Industrial age is over, and the Netcohort Age has begun.

Sometimes I'm a bit slow.

I have spent a great deal of time explaining that industrial age bureaucracies were not just in industry, but in all of the too bigs: government, education, religions, unions, etc. I then spent time explaining a rational for economies of scale and how that lent itself to a one size fits most society.

I had not considered that some prefer to use the industrial age moniker as a way to misdirect attention from where it belongs. Those that want to blame capitalism for all the worlds ills for one, others that don't want you looking at unjust too big governments as arising from the same family business as industry. There are others.

It is similar to how governments have recently changed the debate on every one's right to privacy into a witch hunt of private companies that have weak privacy policies. That leaves government free to be as intrusive as they wish. As recently as President Johnson privacy was an acknowledged universal right: "Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private." - Lyndon B. JohnsonLaws were passed to require "privacy," from business intrusions while all other bureaucracies assumed an open policy. Those same laws had many loopholes to allow big business to join into the mining of your private life. The result? All bureaucrats can use what was recently our discretionary property.

So we see that industry is blamed for any ills of the last few hundred years while governments and other bureaucrats claim to have created the benefits.

As you can guess from the title of this journal post, I think it is time to acknowledge the source of much of mankind's current woes - bureaucracies. We are leaving The Bureaucratic Age, nee industrial age.

Yes, there were great advances made under bureaucratic umbrellas - but most were due to individuals that heroically fought inertial resistance and persevered."People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name of protecting us." - Joseph Sobran

It is only in innovation, made possible by individual visionaries, that we will be able to maintain the progression of civilization. It is time the Bureaucratic age ended. We need the self-tailored society being created by the Netcohort.

There ain't no rules around here!We're trying to accomplish something. Thomas Edison

I will try to remember to call it the bureaucratic age in my future writings.